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Steffen Schmidt: Learning outcomes and continuous improvement

I read with interest the Ames Tribune article “ISU faculty with biggest courses get an assignment” which explained the new Iowa law that requires professors in large classes to “… track how well students are learning the information and then make changes based on the data collected, implementing plans to continuously improve their courses.”

Some of us have been using learning outcomes tools for many years and adjusting our instructional material and teaching format to better engage each year’s cycle of students.

For some of us that practice was driven by our research and writing of textbooks and accompanying learning activities and the accompanying learning material. My colleague, Mack Shelley, and I have been actively involved in this because we are co-authors of the major American government and politics textbook that is used by more than 300 colleges, community colleges, and universities.

Community colleges in particular have been pressing their faculty for several years to develop accountability measures in their teaching and our textbook has had strong adoptions at community colleges.

As a side note, I had a chance to talk at a party in Boston this past week with two colleagues and friends who teach and research in medicine and sociology at Harvard University. Harvard, MIT and some of the other elite universities do not require such formalized measurement.

Instead, as one put it, “We measure outcomes success by the almost universal excellent placement of our students in top positions in business, government, and education.”

When I pressed her she said, “Well, Steffen, we only recruit the top faculty in the world and we trust them to do a great job.”

Their views can be seen in the context of the $40 million learning/teaching program launched by Harvard several years ago with the following goals: Faculty members should lecture less and experiment with new, more active methods of instruction.

The faculty should participate in developing reliable methods of assessing student progress to determine which forms of instruction are most effective in helping students learn.

Departments need to help restructure graduate education to acquaint future faculty with what is becoming known about how students learn, what methods of instruction are most successful and how technology can be used to engage student interest and help them progress.

The need for accountability and for addressing the ever-changing learning skills of college students is a reality that is magnified by the advent of information technology, the Internet and social media.

Each of these technology-driven developments represents a significant shift from primarily text-based information to highly graphical and visual learning. It also has signified a massive shift to what I call “concised information,” which is Über-compressed material that communicates information in tiny bursts.

Take for example Keek, which, according to a report in the Star Phoenix, is “… a blend of YouTube and Twitter. Its users post short videos (up to 36 seconds in length) detailing their travels, thoughts and activities. As of June 25, the company had 50 million users in more than 200 countries. Founded in 2011, the company is adding 200,000 new users a day….”

Keek is similar to Hictu, which allows you to “share what’s on your mind RIGHT NOW” that lets you “microblog” with video and images.

We also face a daunting challenge in the communications habits of each new cycle of students. Most professors think email is the cool student way of communicating. Actually, in my large classes I have discovered that students rarely use email and also find it awkward to “log in” to Blackboard, the classroom management system used in most courses at Iowa State University.

Instead they prefer to interact with Facebook and use it as a pervasive platform for life’s activities all day long. Most of them never log out, but have Facebook running 24/7.

This phenomenon has raised the question of how professors can use unconventional platforms to drive their teaching-learning activities. The goal is to engage students, grab their attention away from the massively disrupted “cyberlives” they lead, and inject instructional value into this on-going stream of information churning.

I know many readers and colleagues will find this not just disturbing but perhaps alarming. However, teaching and learning is a very complex activity in which seizing on the neurological path of least resistance to getting students’ attention is critically important to success.

As I suggested above, our textbook publisher has worked every year with us in creating learning material that allows for student knowledge assessment through pretests at the start of the semester, continuous rolling learning evaluations throughout the semester (these allow for adjustments to be made while the class is still under way), and end-of-cycle “what-was-learned” tools to compare results (i.e., student outcomes) with the pretest.

We can then track student learning success from one semester to the next and tweak the material, online discussions and self-learning activities to achieve more desirable outcomes in the next cycle or semester.

One thing we have not mastered yet is how to overcome the lifelong deficiencies that students bring to our classes such as very poor reading and writing skills or family backgrounds where learning was not valued, thus creating a cognitive and motivational “dead zone.”

In that regard, I hope the Legislature in all its wisdom understands that our responsibility as professors is not just to assure that students learn and succeed but that it also is our responsibility to uphold standards of excellence. If we fail to do the latter and are forced by the new outcomes- measure-centered mandate from the Statehouse to do what schools have been plagued with in “No Child Left Behind,” then, instead of success, learning and excellence, we will descend into the disaster of the “teaching-for-the tests” nightmare that is hollowing out our K-12 system. I believe that must be avoided at all costs.

Steffen Schmidt is university professor of political science at Iowa State University.

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